I'm a Game Design major and I feel like half the stuff I learned at college I could have learned for free watching Extra Credits. They're about as well informed in the field as you can get. Yes, they do make factual mistakes, but their general theories and points are always spot on.
Just to re-emphasize something here: I'm looking for facts, data, interview excerpts, seminars, and the like. Is Disgaea 4 a good game? Most people who played it will say yes. But in reality, that doesn't mean a thing when you're talking about where the industry is at and where it's heading, because it wasn't commercially successful enough to send waves through the industry.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe that any of the games you mentioned sold more than 1 million (which is an arbitrary and convenient number I'm using to make a point). Catherine was somewhere just shy of half that, iirc. I'm a huge fan of Persona but I don't recall hearing that did any better. Dark Souls and FF13 are the only ones in recent memory that exceeded 1 million sales (again, I could be wrong, as I'm still lacking in factual sources.) Meanwhile you've got 10 million people who've played Skyrim, 10 million still playing World of Warcraft, and at least 2 million people with each Bioware release (usually much more.)80Maxwell08 said:OT: Also you really chose a bad topic for your paper. You are just speculating here. Check out Catherine, Zettai Hero Project, the Disgaea series, Persona games, the Tales of games, the Ys series. There are so many games coming out of Japan that no one even notices people say it's dead because of some of Square Enix's and Capcom's games. Atlus and NIS America have plenty of good games out (and some bad ones don't get me wrong) and XSEED brings over plenty of great games as well like the Ys series previously mentioned and The Legend of Heroes game. Speaking of XSEED they also brought over Half-Minute Hero one of my favorite RPGs out right now. Yes Keiji Inaune has talked about the Japanese industry before and has had a lot of bad things to say but it sounded like he was speaking about Capcom alone who have proven themselves to be colossal idiots recently. Honestly the people who say Japanese games are bad just don't even bother looking around.
Just to re-emphasize something here: I'm looking for facts, data, interview excerpts, seminars, and the like. Is Disgaea 4 a good game? Most people who played it will say yes. But in reality, that doesn't mean a thing when you're talking about where the industry is at and where it's heading, because it wasn't commercially successful enough to send waves through the industry.